Sugar, Spice & Everything Nice

I love getting together with my good friend, Yasmina. I met her through Ned about 4 years ago when we first moved to Berlin. They’d been friends since they were young teenagers. Yasmina’s father, who was a diplomat, had moved their family from Jakarta to McLean, Virginia. It was there that they attended the same junior high school and had become friends. They lost contact with each other but managed to reconnect on Myspace (remember that?) and then again on Facebook many years later. Coincidentally, they found out on Facebook that they both had relocated to Berlin in the same exact month. She and I have been friends ever since. We found out that we both had some similar interests. We both love most anything having to do with food and cooking. She’s helped me tremendously and been a huge advocate for me in all my food adventures. She’s even helped me land several cooking jobs and taught me tons about photography, which has resulted in better photographs for my blog, which she also had a big part in helping me design. I’m really grateful for all of her help, support and belief in me. I think everyone needs someone like Yasmina to be a champion for them!

Hanging out with Yasmina, even when it involves work is always fun. Naturally, food is inevitably involved, and this past Friday was no different. We’d gotten together to take a few photographs for her website. She had a great idea for a visual of spices used in Indonesian cuisine, and it also was an opportunity to for me learn about a few things about Indonesian cookery, a cuisine that Yasmina is very passionate about. I had the opportunity to taste, smell and play with a variety of spices, sugars and pastes. For example, palm sugar, which I’ve always been curious about, is so beautiful. The variety that Yasmina brought to photograph came in the form of a cookie-shaped disc; golden tan on its exterior and with a creamy white center. She also brought a very tangy tamarind paste that was heaven to my taste buds, as it was both sour and sweet, and a very pungent dehydrated shrimp paste, which stuns the senses if you catch a whiff of it, but it’s so necessary in certain Asian cuisines.

Here are just a few of the shots that Yasmina took, along with texts in Indonesian, English and German. Ever the designer and all-round bad-ass, Yasmina picked out a pretty cool font too, right?